Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts is an annual multidisciplinary arts festival that celebrates working class cultures. As the longest-running labour arts festival in Canada, Mayworks continues to forge new links between artists and workers, encouraging art to inspire labour and labour to incite art.

In solidarity with shared struggles for decent wages and healthy working conditions, Mayworks 2017 centred on Art Against Precarity. For our 2018 Festival, as we celebrate the victories for workers secured by $15 and Fairness and Make It Fair campaigns, we anticipate the futures that could exist when labour and grassroots social movements work together for our collective liberation. We draw inspiration from the labour of movement building, not just as a political practice, but also a space for deep learning and radical experimentation.

Indebted to the work of revolutionary cultural movements including Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism, Mayworks welcomes submissions that take cues from our diverse histories to imagine the futures of work and culture from the perspectives of artists-as-workers and workers-as-artists.

For the 33rd Mayworks Festival taking place in May 2018, we invite submissions for art projects from all disciplines (visual art, film and video, digital media, music, dance, theatre, performance, and beyond) that travel in time, speculate and dream about what the future holds for workers.

Mayworks’ artistic vision commits to equitable programming that includes Indigenous people, Black people, people of colour, LGBTQ2 people, people with disabilities, and young people as audiences and artists. To that end, we highly encourage applicants from members of these equity-seeking groups.